Anthropic announces that Claude can finally now search the web

An illustration of the web search feature in Claude

Anthropic has announced that its LLM chatbot, Claude, can now browse the web. If you don't know what Claude is, it's an LLM chatbot developed by Anthropic, a San Francisco-based AI research company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei. Claude's been around since early 2023 and features models like Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus.

So Claude is getting a feature its main competitor, ChatGPT, has had for a while now. Remember, the early prototype search feature was introduced in June 2024 for select testers, with the feature expanding to all ChatGPT users in December, and to users with no accounts last month.

Unlike ChatGPT, there's no dedicated "Search" button in the Claude input box to permit the chatbot to browse the web. Instead, you'd have to turn on web search in your profile settings. Plus, from the demo, it looks like Claude will only pull information from the web whenever it deems it appropriate.

Just like ChatGPT, Claude will provide direct citations so that you can fact-check sources when the chatbot includes information pulled directly from the web. Here's a list Anthropic provided of things Claude can help you with when web search is enabled:

Sales teams can transform account planning and drive higher win rates through informed conversations with prospects by analyzing industry trends to learn key initiatives and pain points.

Financial analysts can assess current market data, earnings reports, and industry trends to make better investment decisions and inform financial model assumptions.

Researchers can build stronger grant proposals and literature reviews by searching across primary sources on the web, spotting emerging trends, and identifying gaps in the current literature.

Shoppers can compare product features, prices, and reviews across multiple sources to make more informed purchase decisions.

Web search in Claude is out in feature preview for all paid Claude users in the US, with support for free users and users in other countries on the way.